Tango Steps Up Game Focus With Former Zynga Exec

Tango is a startup that has built a free video calling service for mobile-device users with some similarities to Skype or Apple’s FaceTime. But its users have begun to use the platform to play games, a trend Todd Arnold aims to accelerate.

The Silicon Valley company on Thursday is announcing that it has recruited Arnold, who had worked for nearly four years at Zynga. He was most recently a senior vice president at the San Francisco social-gaming company, with a resume that includes running Zynga’s big FarmVille franchise.

Arnold is not some newcomer to videogames. He is a 20-year veteran in the business, with a resume that includes stints at Broderbund and Electronic Arts.

At Tango, a company known for video communication on mobile devices, Arnold says he sees the latest evolution in a shift away from console or PC games that cost users a substantial software investment up front to play.

He adds that he remains optimistic about Zynga’s prospects, despite its recent troubles.

“I didn’t leave Zynga because there was some horrible thing happening,” Arnold says. “What really drew me is what is happening at Tango.”

And that has been growth, says Eric Setton, Tango’s chief technology officer and co-founder. The company says it now has more than 150 million registered users.

While starting with real-time communications between iPhone and Android device users, Tango found a need to broaden its business–in part because many people aren’t there when a user tries to call them. So it added other services, including free text messages that can be posted along with pictures.

Then came gaming. Tango and its software developers “are recreating social gaming, but for mobile,” Setton says.

Arnold says what had taken him to Zynga was the realization that there were more people playing FarmVille on a given day, because of its connection to Facebook, than all the PC and console games he had ever been involved with producing. In other words, the problem of distributing software had been solved.

“What Facebook did is it provided a new entry point by turning distribution on its head,” Arnold says.

And Arnold thinks Tango, because of its large user base, could have a similar impact. “It looked to me so much like Facebook opening up its platform to game developers like Zynga,” he says.